Hollie McNish, Salena Godden, Dominic Berry, Lisa Luxx, and Caleb Femi are on the shortlist for best spoken word performer in the Saboteur awards, it was announced on Monday by organisers Sabotage Reviews. Voting is now open until 30 April to find the winners.

The best spoken word night contenders are the nationwide That’s What She Said; Wakefield’s Unity Words; Evidently, from Salford; Edinburgh’s Interrobang?!; and Word (Leicester).  

Nominated for best spoken word show are Fat Girls Don’t Dance by Maria Ferguson; How To Starve An Artist (Rose Condo); McCleary & Blair Panda to the Audience; The Selkie – A Song of Many Waters by Fay Roberts; and Show Me the Money (Paula Varjack).

Contenders for best poetry pamphlet are Glass by Elisabeth Sennitt Clough (Paper Swans Press); Copeland’s Daughter by Stephanie Conn (Poetry Business); Found Me by Emma van Woerkom (Read Fox Books); Everything is Scripted by James Giddings (Templar); and Waves on a boring beach by Emma Hammond (Zimzalla).

The shortlist for best anthology is An Unreliable Guide to London (Influx Press); Half Moon: Poems about Pubs (OWF Press); Remembering Oluwale (Valley Press); The Chronicles of Eve (Paper Swans Press); and The End: Fifteen Endings to Fifteen Paintings (Unthank).

Best innovative publisher contenders are last year’s winner, Burning Eye Books; 2016’s runner-up, Indigo Dreams; another previous winner, Penned in the Margins; plus Unthanks Books, and Zimzalla.

The shortlist for best wildcard is I am not a silent poet; JR Carpenter’s The Gathering Cloud; Women Aloud NI; Poetry as F*ck; and Lunar Poetry Podcast.

And we at Write Out Loud – including the author of this article – are rather pleased that our news editor Greg Freeman has made the Reviewer of the Year shortlist! His fellow contenders in this category are Dave Coates, Freya McClements, Jessica Traynor, and Scott Manley Hadley.

You can find more information about the awards, including longlists in each category, on the Sabotage Reviews website. Nearly 2,200 people sent in nominations this year, with Sabotage’s editors adding one of their own to each shortlist. Voting is now open until 30 April to determine the winners, and the results will be announced on 13 May at a special evening event at Vout-O-Reenees in London.